Privatizing Waterworks: Learning from the French Experience*
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this pair of articles, the first of which was published almost 25 years ago, two distinguished economists make and then revisit the case for privatizing the water supply. While agreeing with the general assessment that waterworks are “natural monopolies,” the authors show that privatization of such enterprises need not lead to the standard monopoly outcomes of above‐competitive prices, reduced output, or inferior service. As evidence, the authors cite the French experiment with water privatization that began in 1782 with the Perrier brothers' 15‐year contract to provide water for Parisians. Today, an estimated 80% of the French water supply is managed by private firms. And, as the French experience demonstrates, the benefits of large‐scale, single‐firm operations can be obtained at competitive prices by means of a system of franchise bidding in which ownership and/or management rights are awarded to the firm that offers the public the best terms—along with a credible commitment to make good on them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it